Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I was a kid at the right time. I came along when it was still fashionable to scare the shit out of children with kid's movies. Something Wicked This Way Come, The Neverending Story, The Black Cauldron, Legend, The Watcher In The Woods, The Black Hole. All these and probably a dozen more my sleep-deprived festival brain is forgetting to mention were a big part of my development as a cinephile.
That weird kiddie-friendly genre flick doesn't really exist much anymore. Laika does a decent job not shying away from the creepier stuff from time to time, but on the whole the powers that be tend to keep their family films trauma-free.
Not Tim Burton, though. Not with this new film. Mark my words: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children will fuck your kids up! Nightmares, bed-wetting, tears in the theater, the whole nine yards. All that'll happen and you know what? They're going to love every second of it.
People forget that most kids love to be scared. As you grow older you become a little more immune to that deep sense of dread that a good scary film can give you, but when you're a kid it's all so fresh and present and real. I think a lot of us horror fans are obsessed with the genre because we're chasing that raw feeling of terror we remember so fondly from our childhoods.
Now, Miss Peregrine is not a horror film per se, but that doesn't mean there's not imagery in this thing that's any less nightmare-inducing. I mean, the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang messed up a whole generation of kids and that's not a horror movie.
Think of this film as X-Men via Tod Browning's Freaks. There are people with special talents that would be considered mutants in the X-verse, but are called Peculiars here. They can be all ages, but most of the ones we meet in this story are children and have been for quite some time.
You see, most of the Peculiars are in hiding because of this monstrous race of creatures called Hollows (short for Hollowghast) are hunting them down and eating their eyes. Yes, you heard me right. Eating their eyes.
This is where most of your kids are going to be getting their nightmare inspiration from. These things are like mixing Slenderman and Jack Skellington together and Burton doesn't shy away from the fact that they like to eat eyeballs. There's literally a scene showing one eating a pile of loose eyeballs.
Why the eyeballs? There's a reason, but I don't want to talk about all the cool stuff in the movie. Needless to say, they want and need them juicy peepers and by God they're a lot more successful in getting them than you'd think they'd be in a family film.
To protect the children while the minions of darkness are out there, Peculiars with the ability to create a time loop are put in charge of small groups of them, a bit like a teacher or nanny. Eva Green plays Miss Peregrine, the pipe-smoking, shapeshifting time-turner in charge of the group of children at the center of this story. She's set her loop in 1943 Wales, which is a bit of a shock when young Jake (Asa Butterfield) stumbles upon it while looking into some of now deceased Grandfather's crazy stories of his youth.
Jake's the main character, the Harry Potter of this world... he's a normal kid with normal parents, but he does have an eccentric grandpa. Naturally that means they're very close. The scenes we get with Jake and his gramps (played by the great Terence Stamp) are lovely and sweet. He has the best stories about hunting monsters and the peculiar friends he had in his childhood and it was great to see Stamp fully embrace some of the weirdness of the character in a way that made you instantly regret that he's not your grandpa. I mean, my granddad is pretty awesome. He was a bomber pilot in WW2 and has tales about flying his plane in so riddled with bulletholes and flack damage that he's surprised it didn't crumple on the runway. So, I wouldn't trade him out for Terence Stamp, but I'd have a little think about it before making the call, I must admit.
Anyway, Jake's a fine audience POV character who has a little strength of his own that he discovers as the shit hits the fan and he's suddenly expected to help protect the kids. Butterfield is a great young actor who has turned in some solid performances in Hugo and Ender's Game and finds some nuance to play with in this familiar reluctant hero type.
Eva Green is, as usual, the best and plays Miss Peregrine a bit like a more demented Mary Poppins. She's clearly having a blast chewing the scenery in every single scene and it actually hurts the movie a little bit when she's out of the picture. Thankfully all the Peculiar children are pretty awesome and the movie's never more fun than when they work together to defeat the big bad guys.
I also really appreciate how Burton changed up his style for this film. His recent family fare has been bright and happy (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland), but he doesn't go cartoony here, but also avoids his trademark “strange and unusual” photography. It's a nice middle ground between the two.
The highest compliment I can give this film is I was completely unfamiliar with the source material and now I really want to pick up the books and see the further adventures of Jake and his Peculiar friends.
I had a lot of fun with this one and I'm very excited to see it again with my nephews in tow. After all, it'll be their parents that will have to deal with the 2am screaming nightmares not me, right?
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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